Just before the second world war, the young Isaiah Berlin paid a social call on Sigmund Freud in London. Privately, Berlin was less than convinced about Freud's achievement, as his biographer Michael Ignatieff recounts: "Freud himself answered the door-bell and ushered Berlin into the famous study ... When Freud asked Berlin what he did, and Isaiah replied in German that he attempted to teach philosophy, Freud replied sardonically, 'Then you must think me a charlatan.' That was close to the mark, but Berlin protested. 'Dr Freud, how can you think such a thing?'"

Freud's wife and grandson Lucian joined them for tea in the garden. The atmosphere, Berlin later recalled, was "pure Vienna". If Berlin could later acknowledge his pleasure that "the professor" had seen his own worth, he could not fully repay the compliment, always feeling some distaste for psychoanalytic ideas. Ignatieff notes that Berlin continued to regard Freud as "an old Jewish doctor, clever, malicious and wise".

Twenty-five years earlier, in 1913, an article in The Athenaeum had confidently predicted that "Englishmen have little to learn about the manner of telling dreams, however deficient they may be in interpreting them", and concluded that Freud was preoccupied with the morbid rather than the healthy dreamer and betrayed, in his tendency to introspection, the hallmarks of an "Oriental heredity". The anonymous reviewer complained that "an atmosphere of sex pervades many parts of the book and renders it very unpleasant reading. The results he reaches are hardly commensurate with the labour expended, and reveal a seamy side of life in Vienna which might well have been left alone."

Freud's claims for the existence of childhood sexual fantasy were to prove a particular sticking-point. In 1914 an article in the British Medical Journal complained about the "excessive sexual probing which is so conspicuous in the methods of the present day". Might Freud's methods not create the very "cesspools" they were meant to be investigating? Another contributor argued that Freud's work was even worse than the "revolting" form of "phallic worship" already to be found (mercifully in Latin) in the sexology of that earlier Viennese pioneer, Dr Krafft-Ebing. Freud, Dr Mercier suggested, offered a still more corrosive "new pornography": "Sex, sex, sex, in its grossest aspect is now 'dinned' into readers' ears, for hours every day, and every failure to elicit a confession is met by the suggestion of some new form of beastliness. The Freudian finds tongues (talking dirt) in trees, books (on beastliness) in the running brooks, sermons (on sexuality) in stones, and filth in everything." English psychologists, members of a nation that "led the civilised world", were advised to give it a miss.

Psychoanalysis is a world-wide movement but with extraordinary national diversities of theory and technique. Its point of departure was Freud's work on hysteria, dreams and sexuality, published between 1895 and 1905. By the early years of the 20th century, Freud had gathered around him a small and enthusiastic band of co-workers. Storms of controversy would soon follow, most famously in the irreversible fall-out between Freud and Jung, but what of the diffusion of Freud's ideas themselves? In England, we know that a few sexologists, writers, educational reformers and "psychical researchers" soon began to take note, but much about the reception of psychoanalysis remains obscure. Some commentators sympathetic to the Freudian tradition have lovingly reminded us about a lost "golden age", when the idea of the unconscious fully gripped the imaginations of major intellectual and creative talents. Many others have dismissed Freud as muddled, pernicious or simply irrelevant.

Records and reminiscences remain scattered. Some oral histories have been attempted: recollections of the movement during and after the second world war by the eminent psychoanalysts Hanna Segal and Betty Joseph can be consulted on the website of the Melanie Klein Trust, while Riccardo Steiner has studied the institutional politics of the period. Other personal testimonies are now being assembled by the Freud Museum. But American and French historians have provided a far fuller picture of the politics and broad position of psychoanalysis in their two countries. The monumental history of Freud's Gallic reception produced by Elisabeth Roudinesco, La Bataille de Cent Ans, is an outstanding example.

In an influential essay, published in the New Left Review in 1968, "Components of the National Culture", Perry Anderson argued that the less than wholehearted acceptance of psychoanalysis in England was a reflection of the "most conservative [society] in Europe". Describing a wider resistance to ambitious theory dating back to the 19th century, he argued that while one could witness, during the first half of the 20th century, a massive injection of continental talent, this was less disruptive of the national culture than appeared at first sight. The migrant intellectuals (such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl Popper, Ernst Gombrich and Isaiah Berlin) hosted and toasted here did not fundamentally change the mind-sets of their empiricist hosts, he argued. Rather, they tended to be "assimilated".

But one can cite significant instances of early intellectual interest in Freud in the UK, as well as broader enthusiasm for the talking cure's therapeutic potential. Ideas about the unconscious proliferated in inter-war Britain. Admittedly, these were often relayed very approximately and "second-hand" from Vienna; and Freud's work was not infrequently confused with an earlier legacy, the unconscious as conceived by Victorian philosophers and psychologists, or by the lead figures of English romanticism (who had imported much of the baggage from German philosophy). But with the establishment of a British Psychoanalytical Society after the first world war, the movement had a focal point and, in the controversial person of its president, Ernest Jones, it had an indefatigable ambassador, with something of a hotline to Freud himself.

"And so, who could remain unmoved when Freud seemed suddenly to plunge towards the origins?" asked DH Lawrence in his essay, "Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious". Lawrence's attitude mixed awe with derision and dread of "this new doctrine - it will be called no less - [that] has been subtly and insidiously suggested to us, gradually innoculated into us". But neither he, nor other modern novelists, felt they could ignore Freud's claims.

Virginia Woolf's diaries are studded with intriguing references. She, like Isaiah Berlin, took tea with Freud in London. She also met Melanie Klein, Freud's follower, and invited her for dinner. Klein, in Woolf's view, was a person to be reckoned with: "a woman of character & force & some submerged - how shall I say - not craft, but subtlety: something working underground. A pull, a twist, like an undertow: menacing. A bluff grey haired lady, with large bright imaginative eyes." Woolf's diary entry for March 11, 1939 made reference to attending a "great Psycho Analysts dinner on a wild wet night ... Speeches of a vacancy and verbosity incredible". Soon after Freud's death in 1939, and not long before her own, she was "gulping up Freud"; his work was to help her "enlarge the circumference. to give my brain a wider scope: to make it objective; to get outside. Thus defeat the shrinkage of age." She acknowledged its effect as upsetting, "reducing one to a whirlpool; & I daresay truly. If we're all instinct, the unconscious, whats all this about civilisation, the whole man, freedom &c? His savagery against God good. The falseness of loving one's neighbours. The conscience as censor. Hate ... But I'm too mixed. I'm going to begin Mill on Liberty."

Another Bloomsbury intellectual, the historian Lytton Strachey, had got his admiration in early, corresponding with and sending work to Freud. Ideas of the unconscious were to provide some inspiration, as he sought to illuminate the secret passions of Queen Elizabeth and Queen Victoria, and he attended meetings of the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology in 1918. His brother James went on to train as a psychoanalyst and to become an organising figure behind the Standard Edition English translation of Freud's works, which appeared during the 1950s and 60s, under the auspices of Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press. Virginia's brother Adrian Stephen and his wife Karin also trained, as did James Strachey's wife, Alix.

In a poem written on Freud's death in 1939, "In Memory of Sigmund Freud", WH Auden wrote: "if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd,/ to us he is no more a person/ now but a whole climate of opinion/ under whom we conduct our different lives". Less often remembered than Auden's poem, or than HG Wells's prediction that Freud and Jung would take their places in history alongside Newton and Pasteur, are the discussions of Freud to be found in the work of the economist Maynard Keynes (he thought discoveries about the unconscious useful in illuminating the symbolic meaning of money), or in the writings of the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowksi, who took issue with the notion of the universality of the Oedipus Complex in his book Sex and Repression in Savage Society. The historian Lewis Namier, best known for his probing explorations of what made 18th-century members of parliament tick, was another early enthusiast. According to Namier, you should never take a politician's explanation for his actions at face value. All such outward pronouncements were but "flap-doodle", the real motives had to be inferred from a deeper knowledge of human nature.

At Cambridge university a Freudian sub-culture flourished, leading various scientists, philosophers and literary critics to discuss psychoanalytic writings, and sometimes to become closely involved in an increasingly partisan debate. In some circles, it was argued that serious discussion of psychoanalysis must entail direct experience as a patient. Amongst those who took up this challenge was the young Cambridge philosopher and mathematician Frank Ramsey (a friend of Wittgenstein's), who travelled to Vienna and underwent a six-month analysis in 1924 with one of Freud's followers, Theodor Reik.

Laura Cameron and John Forrester have written about the botanist Sir Arthur Tansley, who in 1913 became the first president of the British Ecological Society. His books laid the foundations for plant ecology and, in time, he was to be showered with honours. But interspersed with his scientific career was an extraordinary excursion into psychoanalysis. While studying plant sciences as a young academic, he taught himself German and developed an interest in psychology. While working in the ministry of munitions at some point in the first world war he had a dream, set in a sub-tropical country and featuring, along with his wife, some South African "savages". He later indicated that this dream was a major turning point in his life and a spur to contacting Freud. One early fruit of Tansley's explorations was a book, The New Psychology and its Relation to Life (1920). On April 6 1922, Freud wrote to Ernest Jones in London: "Tansley has started analysis last Saturday. I find a charming man in him, a nice type of the English scientist. It might be a gain to win him over to our science at the loss of botany."

Early 20th-century interest in Freud was not limited to the literary salons and university common rooms of an elite, however. In the newspaper archives at the British Psychoanalytical Society, started by Ernest Jones, are numerous articles and reports from which we can glean the diverse attitudes to Freud expressed in the Evening Standard, Daily Mirror and Liverpool Echo alongside The Times, Spectator and Church Times. "We are all psychoanalysts now", the New Statesman declared in 1923, while a 1928 review in the Daily Herald warmly commended Jones' s latest book on "the talking cure": "It is a splendid example of just how such a book should be written to make a scientific subject 'come alive' to a working man or woman of only average education." Even the Housekeeper magazine sought to boil down the latest psychoanalytic findings from Vienna.

By 1925 the English press was agog with news of a psychoanalytic film, about to be made, so it was said, with Freud's backing, Secrets of the Soul . The Daily Mirror felt "faint alarm", anticipated trouble with the censor, if it was ever released, and warned its readers that "If we are to believe our psycho-analysts, the Subconscious is much worse than any of Mr Noel Coward's fallen angels. If so dreadful a person were made visible, even for a moment, he, she or it - we don't know what gender to give them - would frighten the most hardened lover of cinema horrors out of the dark into the light of the street."

Not all developments in early 20th-century psychotherapy were exclusively modelled on Freud's own ideas. Influences were often eclectic - thus a small outpatient dispensary administering some form of psychotherapy in Brighton in 1905 apparently owed little if anything to psychoanalysis. Influential commentators such as the anthropologist and doctor WHR Rivers, who wrote a pioneering article on the psychology of the unconscious in the Lancet during the first world war, had balked at Freud's theories about sexual fantasy and repression. Nonetheless, he sought to promote the clinical efficacy of psychoanalytical method for the treatment of "shellshock" (in suitably modified form).

It was not until after 1918 that the line of orthodoxy really started to be drawn. During the war, some experiments had been possible, for example at London's Brunswick Clinic which, in its brief heyday, presented a lively setting for new ideas, and opened its doors three afternoons a week to provide treatments for a standard fee of 2s 6d: psychotherapy, electric baths, massage, occupational therapy (art, gardening, music, dancing, handicrafts) and, occasionally, drugs. Records from the early days of the Maudsley hospital provide evidence of discussion of work by Jung, Freud, and the French psychologist Pierre Janet, as well as growing indications of the shape of things to come: namely the consolidation of a consistently critical approach towards psychoanalysis in academic and mainstream clinical psychiatry.

Curiously, the humanities discipline probably least touched by Freudianism has been history itself. Most historians have been quick to dismiss the cranky, minority pursuit of "psycho-history", which seeks to deploy insights into the unconscious in the study of earlier epochs or lives. Despite a few English ventures into Freudian territory (as in the work of the aforementioned Strachey, or, still more fleetingly, in the assumptions about political psychology made by Namier), "psycho-history" acquired a predominantly American imprimatur in the 1950s. The records of the Royal Historical Society in London turn up no citations of Freud whatsoever. Tellingly, the best-known work of "psycho-history" produced in England, Norbert Elias's The Civilising Process, was the work of an emigré sociologist whose academic position in England at the time (the 1930s) was marginal and difficult.

The group of Marxist historians who made so large an impact on post-war British social and cultural history by and large paid no heed to psychoanalysis. In an interview in the 1970s, Eric Hobsbawm explicitly dismissed Freud as a "bad historian". EP Thompson, however, while complaining furiously about some forms of continental abstraction in The Poverty of Theory, had already offered his own extraordinary "psycho-history" of Methodism in his great book of the early 60s, The Making of the English Working Class. Strikingly, his footnotes point us towards the work of Erich Fromm rather than Freud. Fromm, once an orthodox analyst who had trained in Berlin in the 1920s, had left Europe for America, where his radical mix of psychological and political ideas would make him famous in the counter-culture of the 1960s.

In a rare interview with the BBC, Freud noted how dearly he had paid for his "piece of good luck", namely his discoveries about the unconscious. Resistance to these findings, he observed, had been "strong and unrelenting", and "the struggle is not yet over". In my view, as a psychoanalyst and a historian, the skills and insights of the historian are indispensable to the kind of inquiry into fluctuating cultural attitudes that we require before drawing conclusions about Freud's impact in Britain. There are books on Hitchcock and psychoanalysis, passing references to the intriguing encounter between Laurence Olivier and Ernest Jones as the actor prepared the part of Hamlet, just as there are learned asides on Wittgenstein's changing views of The Interpretation of Dreams. But there is little sense of an overall picture.

Freud suggested that the unconscious did not obey the logic of time; but pundits have no excuse for excising the richness and complexity of the history of psychoanalysis. And as his critics insist afresh that Freudian theories of the mind, methods of investigation and techniques of therapy have all had their day, they perhaps but echo their great grandparents.

Daniel Pick is a psychoanalyst and professor of cultural history at Queen Mary, University of London. His most recent book is Svengali's Web. Bloomsbury and Psychoanalysis, an exhibition of photographs and documents, will appear on the website of the British Psychoanalytical Society at www.psychoanalysis.org.uk/ archives.htm, from August 28.